


It Takes A Village

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [42]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Baking, Children, Earth-3, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Gen, Growing Up, Hopscotch, Mirror Universe, POV Female Character, POV Second Person, Secret Identity, Summer Vacation, Team as Family, can be cruel, secret identities are hard when you're seven, to raise a child, what did you say about my mother
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-01 17:41:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11491377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Your family is big and full of amazing people and everybody loves you. You most of all. You never have to worry about being forgotten, or nobody having time for you.The only problem is, no one can ever know.





	It Takes A Village

**Author's Note:**

> Still updating! Slowwwwly. Anybody still with me? XD Here, have some baby clown feels.

It's summer vacation, but you still get up in time for school. All the grownups are pretty serious about your bedtime, even though none of _them_ have one—that's because of work; Aunt Pam says she's _jealous_ of your bedtime and you offered to switch but she says you're not old enough to do her job, which stinks—so you're not tired anymore by six, and you wake up.

You go downstairs and watch cartoons—you've already seen this episode of Transformers, but Sailor Moon comes on after, and that one's new. Then it's Yu-Gi-Oh, which you don't like so much because it's the wrong kind of complicated, and anyway Téa's your favorite and you're bored of waiting for her to do something fun. It's time for breakfast anyway.

Uncle Jon's on the job this morning, which means soft-boiled eggs cut up small with margarine and pepper, which isn't as good as pancakes or waffles, but still pretty yummy. You tell him all about Sailor Moon's defeat of the latest youma plot, and how she's completely _stupid_ but it's okay because she has friends. Uncle Jon doesn't laugh much, but he smiles in all the right places.

Daddy comes home and eats eggs just while you're finishing up, and you climb up on your stool to rinse your bowl and then hang around the kitchen while pretty much everybody else gets breakfast, too. (Uncle Jon doesn't slice up their eggs for them, mostly. Jason just peels and eats three eggs with salt, and licks the runny yolk off his fingers. Mommy would tell him to use a plate and a napkin, but she's not here this morning and nobody else does. You don't, but you duck out of the way when he tries to ruffle your hair after. Yuck.)

Daddy's got a rip in his green sleeve, 'not bad enough to bother Edna with,' so you sit with him and talk while he sews it up. He laughs at all the Sailor Moon jokes, and sometimes when you're not trying to be funny, which is just a thing he does. He says it's because you make him so happy. After he puts the needle and thread away, you practice clapping games together until Mommy comes in and announces that Daddy's up past his bedtime and you have to let him go.

Daddy's bedtime is kind of unpredictable, unlike yours, which is always eight o'clock. At night.

After Daddy goes to bed, you play with your train for a while—you don't have any tracks but you don't _need_ them because tracks are stupid and it's a flying train that can go wherever it wants.

Then Uncle Waylon is making cookies, and he makes the very best cookies, and you like making cookies almost as much as eating them, so you wash your hands and help him roll up the little balls of dough and put them on the cookie sheets in rows. Everybody has different ways of arranging cookies on sheets, you've noticed. Daddy just puts them down anyhow, and Mommy likes to use the round cookie sheet and make circles. Waylon does a weird thing where the rows don't line up but it's still super tidy, locking together like a zipper; it always gets messy when you try that so you just do a grid. It means you have to roll smaller cookies if you don't want them to melt together, but that's okay. The first batch comes out just as you finish filling up your sheet.

Waylon's cookies never wind up burned on the bottom, or even all hard and sort of caramel-tasting, which Mommy says she likes but you think is lame—you can get _crunchy_ cookies from the _store_ —and you bite into a delicious soft chocolatey cookie as soon as it's cool enough. "You should've been a baker, Uncle Waylon," you say, swinging your heels.

He smiles at you, but it's a little sad. His teeth don't show. "Actually, I wanted to be a nurse."

"You _are_ a nurse," you point out. Uncle Waylon spends almost as many hours a week in the clinic as Mommy does, and more than Uncle Jon.

This smile is even sadder. "Yeah, I guess I am."

You don't know what's wrong, but you _hate_ it when people get sad like that and try to pretend they're not, so you launch yourself off the counter and into his stomach, and hold on. He gets an arm up under your butt pretty quick—Waylon's the only grownup who _never_ needs warning to catch you unless he's carrying something that can spill or break—so then you can focus on hugging him properly. "You're the best baker and the _best_ nurse, and anybody who doesn't think so is _stupid._ "

"Thanks, sweetpea," he says, and you hug him harder.

Half the cookies are getting packed up to go to the clinic, but you get three and then Uncle Waylon tells you to wait until after dinner. You say they might all be gone by then. You help him write up a little label to put with the cookies that says Ella gets some after dinner. If anybody else had a sign like that they might only get saved one, but since it's you there will be at least three left, because it says _some_. Six cookies sounds like enough!

He calls you a tricksy little pixie and sends you outside to play until lunch.

You're winning at hopscotch when the game gets interrupted. The nice patch of sidewalk you use is in front of a heavy metal door that none of you have ever seen open; sometimes the garage-door further up the building opens for trucks and you have to get out of the way, but this one has always been locked shut and it doesn't have a handle on the outside or anything so it's hard to even think of it as a door.

But now the latch goes _chunk_ and the door swings open, and the other kids scatter. Not very far, but still further than they need to to get out of the way, which is all you bothered to do.

You wonder if you should join in the scattering, but you recognize the person coming out—recognize his mask, anyway, black and skull-like. Which you guess would maybe be scary if you hadn't met him before. You can tell he recognizes you, too, by the way he pauses to look at you standing there with your feet spread on 4 and 5. "Hello," you say. Marigold Green looks like she thinks you're either brave or crazy, and you try not to get too proud; you're cheating, after all.

"Hello," Black Mask replies. He doesn't bend over or use funny voices just cuz you're little, which is good because he'd look stupid. "Hopscotch?"

You nod, even though it's obvious.

"Kids are still playing that, huh?" He seems happy about it. "How old are you, Little Miss?" He always calls you that except in very private, because it's 'Miss Quinzel' there and that's a secret, just like _his_ real name. Little Miss isn't a great code name, but it's still cool to have one!

"I'm seven and three months and four days," you report proudly.

"Huh. That's pretty old."

You agree that it is, but he's way older. He admits this. You admit in return that he isn't _ancient_ , because that's manners.

"Well, have fun, Little Miss," says Mr. Roman, who clearly has things to go do, even if they aren't Urgent Business.

"I promise, Mr. Black Mask!" you answer. His teeth flash behind the mouth-opening on the mask, and he nods politely before he goes away.

" _I_ know who that was," says Jeremy Ulric as soon as Mr. Roman leaves, sliming out from behind the newspaper box.

You look down your nose at him. He's ten, but he hangs out with younger kids all the time because it makes him feel important. And then he _hides behind boxes_. He's lame.

"That was _Black Mask._ He works for the Penguin. How come he called you Little Miss?"

You shrug. "I dunno. Maybe he just thinks I'm cute."

"Yeah right!" says Anya, who's sore about you being in the middle of beating her hopscotch record. "You totally know him!"

"I do not!"

"How come you weren't scared, then?" that's Benny, who's your friend but still asking, which means you aren't being convincing _at all_.

"I just wasn't. He's not that scary."

"'Little Miss'—your dad is with the mafia, isn't he!" Marigold squeals. Your eyes widen.

"That's stupid," says LaQuenya. _Best_ friend.

"No, it's not!" Marigold insists. "He'd have to be somebody important because Black Mask is, like, the Penguin's right-hand man, he wouldn't call just _anybody_ 'Miss.'"

"Your dad's the Penguin, isn't he?" Jeremy demands, sticking his chest out.

"No!" You've met the Penguin, once, though he didn't know who you really were, and he was okay, but he was funny-looking and smelled like fish and Daddy didn't even _really_ trust him.

"He totally is!" Jeremy crows.

"He is _not!_ "

"It's okay if he is, you know," Benny says, serious behind his glasses. "My dad says the Penguins look out for this neighborhood, without them the Owls would be all over us, and they've got no _honor_." He says 'honor' like he isn't completely sure what it means, but knows it's important.

You scowl, because he _totally_ believes Jeremy and stupid Marigold. "The Penguin _isn't_ my daddy."

"Daaaaaaaddy," sing-songs Jeremy, and a couple of other kids laugh, Anya especially loud. Oh _no._

"He's not! My daddy is brave and smart and good and he's the _best,_ shut up!"

"Well, if he's not the Penguin," says Anya, "who is he?"

Your mouth dries up. This was what you were never supposed to let people wonder. It's so important. "I…I can't say." _It's a secret,_ but that would just make them suspect more.

"Hah! You don't even know him!" says Jeremy, as the same time Marigold says,

"See? I'm right!" and LaQuenya says,

"Shut up!" and Benny says,

"Stop it. Jerry, you're being a jerk."

"I don't have to shut up unless I feel like it," says Jeremy, drawing himself up tall.

"Stop saying things about my daddy," you demand.

Jeremy laughs. "Okay, maybe he isn't the Penguin. Maybe your mom's just the Penguin gang's favorite whore!"

You aren't allowed to hit other kids. Even bigger ones. Everybody was very serious about that. You've been practicing fighting for more than a _year_ now, and unless they're really trying to hurt you, or somebody else who needs help, you are _not allowed to hit anybody._

You bite him, instead.

After that, Jeremy is totally trying to hurt you, so it's fine to hit him. And his stupid friend Shep, who grabs you by the hair, and Mary O'Donald, who just jumps in because she likes fighting. By the time LaQuenya and Benny and Marigold make everybody stop, everybody is looking kind of beat-up. Being better at fighting only goes so far when somebody's three years older than you and somebody else grabs your hair, and boy your lip stings. You lick it. You think it might be bleeding.

"She's crazy!" Jeremy wails, pointing to his bite mark and waving his hand at the same time. "She broke my finger!"

"It's not even dislocated," you say, with all the scorn in your whole body.

Everybody is staring at you.

You run away.

Uncle Jon finds you a while later, tucked into the space beside some steps under the concrete overhang at the edge of them. You're mostly done crying already, and you smudge at your face with your sleeves and breathe deep breaths until they stop hitching on the way in and out. He sits down on the steps while you do, and doesn't say anything for a while.

"So I hear that you used your teeth."

You like Uncle Jon's voice, usually. It's got this singy softness to it even though it's all neat and precise especially on long words. Sort of like his hugs, where you can feel the shapes of his bones through the gentle. You don't like _this_ gentle so much.

"He deserved it!" You explain why, all in a rush, how Mr. Black Mask interrupted the game and all the nasty things Jeremy said about you and your parents and your _mom_ , and finish with, "And I was _winning_ and it's not _fair!_ "

You sniffle.

A hand comes down on your head, long and narrow like Daddy's but more so, and not as warm. "Was fighting the right thing to do right then?"

"Yes. No. I don't know! He wouldn't _stop!_ "

Uncle Jon's fingers card through your hair. "There's usually a better way to stop someone saying mean things than biting them."

Now you just feel stupid. "But people were _listening,_ " you mumble.

"…you should probably talk to your parents about this," Uncle Jon says. "But it's just as important to learn to win without fighting as it is to learn to win fights."

"…next time he's mean can I have some nightmare juice?"

Uncle Jon snorts, and his hand in your hair pats your head kind of hard before going away. "That's still fighting, it's just a sneakier way of doing so. And my formulas aren't for getting revenge."

You drip a few more tears. "Sorry," you say really small.

Uncle Jon's hand comes back. "It's okay. You're allowed to have bad ideas. Everybody does sometimes."

You guess that's true. Mommy gets annoyed with Daddy sometimes when he has bad ideas and goes ahead with them without talking to her first, but she doesn't get _super mad._ And those are things he really _did,_ didn't just think about doing _._ Like you really bit Jeremy.

Everybody is going to _hate you forever_ because you're _weird._ "Am I in trouble?"

"With me?" Uncle Jon shakes his head. "Your mom might have a lecture for you before dinner. Come on. It's grilled cheese for lunch."

"With tomato soup?" You like to dip your sandwich in the soup. Jason does that and sucks the soup off and dips the same piece of sandwich again because he's awesome but he's still a _boy_ and boys are _disgusting._

"Of course with soup." He offers his hand, and you take it.

You should probably let go, and go to lunch separately, because talking to anybody in your family for this long outside where anybody could see you is already risky, but you don't. You keep your hand wrapped around three of his long fingers all the way home.

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to tell the daughter of two prominent vigilantes that fighting is not the appropriate solution to people being mean is a difficult job. Strawman did not sign up for this. He isn't even officially in charge of this kid except by virtue of proximity.
> 
> I really didn't know what I wanted to do with Waylon Jones in this 'verse at first, I had even less grasp of him as a person than of Pam, who at least had known values and attachments if not a solid origin story, so I just sort of pitched him into various scenes until he felt comfortable enough to tell me about himself. I should post his backstory at some point.
> 
> Jason's gross soup habits are actually mine. That is a thing I have been known to do. I am not a boy.


End file.
